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You’re In the (Lord’s) Army Now! UU ministers on moving from “congregant” to “seminarian”

This series of posts arose from a discussion among Meadville Lombard students about surprises (some lovely; others less so) that “seminarian” status has brought to our relationships with our home congregations. The churches we belong to are often full of beloved friends and mentors, and the place where a call to ministry was first voiced and nurtured. Must we lose our home churches? These first thoughts are from a minister fresh out of this process: the Rev. Patrick McLaughlin.

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Stay tuned for more perspectives. In the meantime, whether you are a minister, a layperson, or a seminarian yourself, I’d love to hear your take.

-j

Your relationship with your home congregation starts to change the moment you announce to them that you’re stepping over the congregant-minister line by beginning seminary.This can be strange and unsettling.

I was the newly-former president of the board, deeply embedded and well thought of. I was still on the board, given the governance model (that I helped design and led the implementation of). In the service where I revealed what I was doing, the reaction was very positive and affirming, but one of the elder members, on the way out through the line, grumbled, “Well, don’t get a big head…“. That was when I started to realize that everything had changed.

In the congregation’s eyes, you have stepped over the line (a line that may have been invisible to you as you started seminary), and are now becoming a minister. You are now an alien creature. And in short order, more and more of the congregation lose track of the becoming part of that. You are a minister. Even if you’re all at sixes and sevens about it, and your grip on your ministerial identity is sketchy, the people who were your fellow congregants don’t necessarily see that, at all.

Seminarians are urged by the UUMA and MFC processes (and even by the demands of seminary) to disengage from lay leadership. You will still engage in work that a lay person might do… but you will do it as a minister. And as you do that, you naturally start to slide out of leadership, and ultimately out the life of the congregation.

Soon, you begin to inhabit a space where the members of your home congregation just experience you as minister. Thus, what you experience is distancing, because you’re encountered and embraced differently. Only your real, personal friends are still (mostly) there as they were before.

“Do you have advice for aspirants/candidates navigating between their home congregations (from which they were called into ministry, usually) and internship and seminary experiences?”

My first advice is to mourn. You’ve just lost your church. Really. In ways that are almost irrecoverable, you’ve lost the church, and in any church you belong to in the future, you’ll always be different from the rest of the congregation. You’ll belong to it, in ways that are deeper, but you’ve lost it, mostly.

You can’t speak freely. And your minister (who is now also your ministerial colleague) is aware that you need to finish crossing the Rubicon. That minister will insist that you live into this new role plus expect you not to “misbehave,”–not to do those things that a lay person might do and get away with, but which are now violations of professional guidelines and codes about how we ministers act and how we treat one another. And so, in a variety of ways: you’re pushed, pulled, dragged, and thrown over that congregant-minister line. And there is no return.

Do you remember how the process of stepping away from your home congregation worked for you? How have you honored or maintained a connection with “the place that you came from”?

Every case is unique. I’d been one of the most active of lay leaders. Search committee, Welcoming Congregation Committee, Building Chair, Committee on Ministry, Board of Trustees — and more. My wife was Worship chair for nearly six years. So, stepping away was slow, and it was challenging. The first year, I was finishing out the term I’d been elected to on the board. And then, I took on nothing else except what I did as a ministerial student. My family was still very active. I was… there. I’d find myself invited in as a ministerial presence for various functions—but mostly, my task was to figure out how to NOT be an active lay leader, even when and where I so wanted to be. My fingers are flat to this day from sitting on my hands.

Because of the flexibility of Meadville’s part-time program, and my family’s situation and engagement in my home church, we stayed. I just stepped farther and farther away . . . and finally, I stepped back entirely. Sort of. With the minister’s support.

This meant more preaching as a minister— and the church made a point of paying me. And later, when my son became the de facto leader of the youth group, I kept the utmost distance (This was not because of him, per se—he was active in urging me to be chaplain for the YRUU summer and winter camps at de Benneville–which I did, and I strongly encourage anyone to do some of that sort of thing at any of our camps). I kept my distance because I didn’t think the congregation could handle and understand the fine lines there. The family remained very engaged, while I became “the minister they were helping grow,” who in the end, would go away.

There was a lot of work involved in educating our congregation around that, as I am the first person to go from that fellowship to seminary, and to be ordained by them. My ordination was one way I honored my congregation. In the meantime, it was a ruthless process of education. By the time of my ordination, we all knew I was going to New Hampshire, so my leaving was part of the charge to the congregation: “Good job. Congratulations! Now let go of this minister, and start the process again with another. That’s your job now.”

It is sometimes said, perhaps with just a bit of wistfulness, that ‘ministers don’t have ministers.’ Is there a congregation in which you participate in worship or other aspects of congregational life? Who or what ministers to your spiritual needs?”

Ministers DO have ministers; it just doesn’t look quite the same. First, there’s the minister of my home congregation. Although she’s now a colleague and equal, and there are places I don’t fully agree with her… she’s going to be “my minister” for a long time, in many ways.

I have others who fulfill that role, too. My internship supervisor will remain a mentor. She is someone who’s invested in me, but who I had a more equal relationship with as the intern—that person is a minister, and I was a minister-in-training.

And there are others, some of them retired colleagues—in fact, this sort of support may be their real role now for many of us. They’ve been through all this, and can sit back, chuckle, offer some sage advice–and some utterly obsolete, dated, useless advice, too. But these experienced ministers are utterly capable of embracing the hurt, loss, confusion, success, and joy experiences and understanding them. Of soothing. Of cheering.

Finally, there are a handful of collegial friends one turns to, in part to kvetch and be kvetched to. “You will never believe what my Committee on Ministry chair has done…”.

On the whole, we don’t “have ministers” in the same way, but we have ministers, still. And in some ways, the relationships are deeper.

-Rev. Patrick McLaughlin

Rev. McLaughlin is a recent graduate of Meadville Lombard Theological School and the newly settled minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Manchester, NH. He is a life-long UU who grew up all over the western United States, as well as in Australia and Belgium. He attributes finding the right congregation to good fortune, a red clown nose, and a warped sense of humor.

3 thoughts on “You’re In the (Lord’s) Army Now! UU ministers on moving from “congregant” to “seminarian””

Realizing that leaving my home church was part of the deal was one of the hardest parts of answering my call – especially since I had just passed on an opportunity to apply for a staff vacancy precisely because serving as a professional staffer would have meant resigning my voting membership in the congregation. (Local policy is that salaried staff may not be members at the same time. I could go into that, but not right here and now.)

My relationship to my home church is that of a member – right now, a member moving out of lay leadership to enter seminary. I am hoping I can hold onto that this year – it may help that my congregation is getting an intern this year, someone who has already completed her MDiv. I am hoping that when people start looking at me as a student minister I can point them at her and say, “No, no, I’m a lay member of this congregation who happens to be a first year seminary student. The intern minister is over -there-.” It helps, I think, that my home church has an abundance of ministers: besides our settled minister, our DRE is also ordained, and there are (at least) two retired ministers active in congregational leadership as well as one or two more who are really retired. I am grateful to have so many examples to learn from.

And then a year from now, if the stars are right and no major unforeseen changes happen, I will be serving as a site placement student in a different congregation, and I will wear the student minister hat (or robe) and I will not be in my home church except, perhaps, on my Sundays off. And that will be something else again.

I’m very conscious of these lines, these thin bright lines like spiderwebs that connect and divide us at the same time, and how shifting roles sends ripples through this web, tugging on some lines and detaching others. When we talk about the interdependent web of all existence, this is part of what I think of. Because over time these relationships will shift and change. As long as I am a member of the congregation she serves, “Pastor / parishioner” will be part of my relationship with my minister. But sooner or later, either I will move my affiliation elsewhere, or she will seek her next call, and the relationship that remains will shift to that of junior and senior colleagues. Teacher and student, supervisor and intern, senior student and wide-eyed neophyte, they all will shift over time as circumstances demand.

It is an honor and a privilege to follow in such good company. [This is beautiful, my friend. Thanks for sharing this perspective. -j]

Hi Jordinn! It was great to meet you in real life! This interview was so interesting – I can definitely see where the mourning comes in. It is the start of a completely new relationship with the world. Peace!